


Case File Seventeen

by Tozette



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dystopia, Gen, Hospitals, prisons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-19
Updated: 2015-04-19
Packaged: 2018-03-24 20:14:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3782908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dystopian future that is decidedly <i>not</i> one where the Death Eaters win.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Case File Seventeen

 

The Stonnington Clinic had been built over an old London orphanage. It was shiny and new and expensive, but rather soulless for all that. The nurses there were hard-eyed and very direct, and Elise felt very intimidated when she hopped off the tube and arrived five minutes early for her first shift.

“You’ll get used to it,” Croft assured her. She was the nurse unit manager. Elise wasn’t sure she even had a first name. She was a strapping woman with a broad and weathered face and a military bearing. She was, Elise thought, terribly jaded.

One of the first things Croft did was to introduce Elise to the patients. Some of them were not so much introduced as displayed.

“ _Lycanthropy_ ,” said Croft, tapping on a reinforced window. The plaque below said ‘G R E Y B A C K’ but the monster inside was about as far from human as Elise could imagine. “Fascinating stuff. We thought we had a fix, but now he only turns back on the new moon.”

“Oh.” Elise felt a little wobbly.

“Still, it’s more than wizarding medicine ever did.”

“Right,” said Elise, trying to sound worldly and not at all shocked and horrified. Inside his reinforced prison, Greyback snarled.

Croft tapped the window again, and Elise shrieked when the monster hurled himself at it, all teeth and claws and slavering hunger.

“Oh my goodness,” she breathed, clutching at her chest.

“You’ll get used to that, too,” Croft informed her.

“I – of course I will,” said Elise faintly.

“That’s the spirit. Come on, then. We don’t have all day.”

And Greyback wasn’t even the scariest thing in the Clinic.

“He gets fed at midday,” said Croft pointing with her pen to the sealed and barred door. It was not reinforced in the same way as Greyback’s. This door had thick runes of some kind of metal melted into it, and there was only a tiny window through which anybody could see. “No later, no earlier. There’s no clock, so if you’re late he’ll get confused.”

Elise nodded. Carefully, she peered in through the window. Indulgently, Croft let her.

“He’s so… normal looking,” Elise said.

Tom Marvolo Riddle looked very mundane. Dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin. He looked too young for his age - he was in his nineties now, and strange magic was aging him as though he was only fifty.

“What were you expecting? Horns and a tail?”

“No…” A pause. Elise could see that his table was made of plastic, bolted to the floor. His chair was too. The walls were barren and white, and the lights shone brightly down upon him. There was nothing in his face.

“Well, a little,” she admitted. “He just – I expected him to be scary?”

“He’s plenty scary,” said Croft, sucking her teeth. Her face was extremely critical. “Don’t talk to him, even when you bring his food. He’s very… convincing. And don’t look him in the eye.”

“I though they snapped his wand?” Elise said, glancing nervously at the secure room. And it was secure, she knew that much. After the Hogsmeade Accords of 98, the whole wing had been made perfectly secure - a combination of muggle ingenuity and magical warding. They’d never keep Riddle here otherwise.

She sighed. “You’ll learn while you’re here, I expect - magical world has truly barbaric criminal sanctions for mentally ill people -” she added with a disapproving sniff, “but the really strong ones, they don’t need their wands to do little magics.”

“He can _still do magic_?” Elise said, stepping back from the door.

Croft waved this away. “Very little. If he bothers you, sound the alarm and the orderlies will gag him. Don’t listen to him,” she cautioned, “and whatever you do, don’t talk to him. You shouldn’t even stop the recordings, anyway.”

“Right,” said Elise.

“Come on, then,” said Croft, “We’ve got other patients, and it annoys the shit out of me that His Majesty still gets special treatment, even after all the bullshit he put both worlds through. I’ll introduce you to Lovegood, you’ll like him. Crazy, of course, but a damn sight less creepy - he’s not a criminal, technically - they just don’t have the facilities for one like him at the, whatchamacallit, Mungo’s. You know the one.”

“Saint Mungo’s, yes.” Elise smiled gamely if nervously. “It’s not a rehabilitation research facility like this one. General only.”

“Right,” said Croft, as though that was of no interest to her. “Well, they don’t get the kinds of case studies we take advantage of here. Lovegood’s a sweetheart, very low risk, but remember he’s blind, won’t you? Doctor Swan made a right mess when he was having a look inside his head,” she added, and made an annoyed  _tsk_  noise.

It was a week before anybody expected her to feed Riddle and Elise was glad for it.

But midday sounded, and nobody else was doing it - nobody else  _wanted_  to, and she was the newest - so she was sent. The door to Riddle’s cell hissed gently as it unsealed, and Elise left her orderly - a policy-mandated escort - outside while she carefully carried the patient - the prisoner - his meal. They used paper plates, and gave him a plastic spoon; never a knife.

The recording was so loud she couldn’t have heard him if he did speak. It was a woman’s voice, trembling with anxiety. “Lord Voldemort killed my brother because he was a muggleborn,” she said, “and it turns out he’s not even a pureblood himself. I know that’s not what I should be focused on, but the irony is killing me,” she said.

Elise swallowed. She set his lunch down.

Tom Riddle was lashed to his chair with restraints of soft, strong leather. There was a catheter for the expulsion of waste, and he was allowed to feed himself one-handed. Each week they gave him a potion via IV to keep his muscles from atrophying.

Elise didn’t know why. It wasn’t like he was going to use them.

Carefully she unstrapped one wrist.

His expression didn’t change.

“My Aloysius was thirteen when the Death Eaters took him,” said a new recording. “The mediwizards said he’d been alive in their custody for weeks when we found the body.”

Mechanically, Tom Riddle fed himself with his plastic spoon, from his paper plate.

Elise watched his hand, not his eyes, and let the recording wash over her while she tried not to listen.

“My sister was an Inferious,” said somebody else. “He sent her back to her husband and – and my niece - as a warning.”

There was something strangely, horribly dignified about the way he finished his meal.

“My son Fred,” said another woman, with a catch in her voice.

Tom Riddle was done, finally, and Elise snapped his wrist back in its restraint. Her fingers grazed his skin and she flinched. He stilled.

“My mother,” said a younger voice, a boy, “and my father. I live with my grandmother now. I don’t remember them. I wish I did. I feel guilty sometimes.”

The dark lord’s eyes were red and striking, but very normal for all that.

Elise quickly looked away.

“Do you really think,” he said, finally, “that you can keep me here?” His voice was soft and genteel and – Elise was surprised. He sounded perfectly calm and rational, and there was only a hint of hesitation on the sibilants, like his tongue was now the wrong shape. It probably was. Elise had heard stories.

She swallowed. Don’t talk to him, she thought. Don’t engage.

“You’ll die eventually,” she said flatly, unable to help herself, and collected his spoon and plate. She wasn’t to leave anything in the room. Who knew what he might be able to do with it.

“No,” he said, sounding nothing so much as resigned. His voice was barely audible over the recording. “I won’t.”

The door hissed shut, finally, behind her, cutting off the recordings. Elise sagged. Her heart hammered.

“Tomorrow,” she said shakily to her escort, who looked at her with some sympathy, “I’m feeding Greyback. I don’t care how much rabbit blood he gets everywhere.”


End file.
